As you all have probably figured out, I am not anywhere near “the cusp” or “the cutting edge” or whatever of popular culture. So you’ll have to forgive me for being (I think) 10 years late with my review of this one movie.
The movie is “Gone Girl,” and my review of it is basically, it’s the stupidest goddamn movie I have ever seen.
Now to be fair, some of my all-time favorite movies — “UHF,” “Airplane,” “Life of Brian,” “Hot Shots,” “The Naked Gun,” etc. ad nauseam — are beyond any shadow of a doubt, pretty goddamn stupid.
But these movies are intentionally stupid. Their being stupid is the whole point: we the viewers are supposed to watch and laugh at the utter stupidity of not only the plot of these quite stupid movies, but also at the utter stupidity of the characters:
“Don’t call me Shirley.”
“Badgers? We don’t need no stinking badgers!”
“For God’s sake, I’ve even got my father’s eyes.”
…and so on.
Anyway, I never watched “Gone Girl” until last night, and I fell asleep about halfway through, before the evil wife character’s shenanigans are shown; and in the first half I kept saying “oh my God, this movie is stupid” until I rolled over and fell asleep.
Little did I know, the stupidity of the first half of the film was nothing compared to the stupidity of the second half. I mean without even getting into the obvious misogyny of the film’s script, without even attempting to describe the “boys will be boys” macho bullshit the film defends without apology — “I was saying what you wanted me to say,” is roughly what Ben Affleck’s character says to his wife, after she sees him on TV — the dialogue and the plot of “Gone Girl” are so completely idiotic and dumb that in my opinion, it should be in the same genre as “Hot Shots,” “The Naked Gun,” and those sort of films.
And hey, I don’t know or really care what went on between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard a few years back, but it seems like the Depp side kept saying “oh, she’s just like Gone Girl!”
And now that I have actually seen “Gone Girl,” I realize that this argument carries roughly the same weight as “but in ‘Airplane,’ the auto-pilot was a blowup doll, so there must be a blowup doll in the cockpit up there.”
Anyway, O’Bannion is still Affleck’s best role.
